Wilyer Abreu hits 20th home run as Red Sox win seventh straight

Mac Cerullo, Boston Herald on Aug 5, 2026

Published in Baseball

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BOSTON — The wins just keep coming.

After tying the franchise record with 15 straight wins throughout July, the Boston Red Sox are now nearly halfway to another record streak with seven straight wins. The latest was a 4-0 victory over the Chicago White Sox, which was paced by a dominant pitching performance by Sonny Gray and by Wilyer Abreu’s fourth home run in the past three games.

Great as things have been going, Wednesday brought one concerning development.

Less than a week after he was hit in the head by a pitch during last Friday’s series opener against the Los Angeles Dodgers, which resulted in his being placed in concussion protocol for two days, Red Sox first baseman Willson Contreras was abruptly pulled from Wednesday’s game in the fifth inning after coming down with an illness.

It wasn’t clear during the game what the nature of the illness was or if it was in any way connected to possible concussion symptoms.

Though he only played about half the game, Contreras was at the center of the action the whole time he was in.

When White Sox left fielder Sam Antonacci led off the game with a groundout to Contreras at first base, he clipped the Red Sox first baseman with his elbow as he ran past the bag.

Contreras appeared to take exception, but he didn’t have to wait long to get him back.

The Red Sox scored first for the fifth consecutive game when Contreras drove home Wilyer Abreu with an RBI single directly at Antonacci in left field. Then, after Antonacci was hit by a pitch from Sonny Gray his next time up in the third, the White Sox outfielder attempted to score on a two-out ground ball to third from Miguel Vargas that Caleb Durbin stopped but had little chance of getting to first in time.

Recognizing that, Contreras stepped off the bag and fired a perfect strike to home plate. Antonacci was out by a mile and wound up taking Connor Wong’s catcher’s mitt to the face as he slid into the inning-ending out.

Abreu extended Boston’s lead with a two-out solo home run in the bottom of the third. Beyond being Abreu’s third consecutive game with a homer and his fourth over that stretch, he now has 20 home runs of the season.

With that the Red Sox now have two hitters with 20 homers, Contreras being the other. That’s notable given how some preseason projections suggested the club might struggle to produce any 20-homer hitters at all.

The Red Sox only managed two runs over 4 1/3 innings against White Sox starter Sean Burke, a Sutton, Mass., native, but that was plenty of offense for Gray. The Red Sox veteran has endured a string of rocky outings since the All-Star break, but Wednesday he kept the White Sox off the board with six shutout innings, allowing three hits and two walks while striking out eight.

Gray now has 14 quality starts on the season. His ERA for the year is down to 2.78.

Sean Newcomb followed Burke out of the White Sox bullpen and the fellow Bay State product was charged with one run over 1 2/3 innings of relief. The run came after Newcomb allowed a leadoff single in the seventh to Jarren Duran, who’d later come in to score on a sacrifice fly by Andruw Monasterio against recent White Sox trade acquisition Huascar Brazoban.

Durbin wrapped up the scoring with an RBI single in the bottom of the eighth, and Red Sox relievers Tyron Guerrero, Garrett Whitlock and Jovani Moran ensured that was all she wrote.

In addition to extending their latest win streak to seven games, the Red Sox (62-51) are now a season-high 11 games over .500. They’ve won nine of their last 10, are 25-3 dating back to the start of the club’s 15-game win streak on July 3 and are an MLB-best 30-5 since June 25, the night their season turned around.

The Red Sox have also clinched their ninth consecutive series victory and Thursday will go for both the series and the season sweep of the White Sox, who are first in the AL Central and have otherwise been one of MLB’s biggest success stories this season. According to the Red Sox, the nine-series streak is the second longest in franchise history behind only an 11-series streak in 1912.

Ranger Suarez (4-3, 3.15) will take the mound against new White Sox right-hander Luis Castillo (3-9, 5.06), who is expected to make his team debut after being traded from the Seattle Mariners ahead of the trade deadline. First pitch Thursday is 7:10 p.m. ET.

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